Halfway through New Moon now and I think I'll pause to observe that I'm pretty sure by this point that I'd say the underlying message of this series is "submit to the will of something more unknowably perfect than yourself and you may, emphasis may, aspire to become one of the Elect -- I mean, no guarantees, but we're only looking out for your interests". Whether this is supposed to be a metaphor for religion or a high-school clique, Idunno, but it does shed a certain amount of light on both why the demographics that have taken to these books, have really taken to them, and the demographics that are unimpressed, are violently allergic...

(I did pick up the other two books already, so long as I was in the library anyway for knitting-guild. I mean, I've plowed this far into it, you think I'm going to give up before it gets into the real cracky "how is demonbabby formed" stuff...?)

I think that's what the author has set up, yes, and I'm not sure whether she realizes it, or if it's the process-output from the unconscious assumptions she's starting with. I found a line to take particular issue with, so I'll probably be ranting about this in quite a bit of depth as this goes on...

Mean to, which is sort of why I started this to have some context. And like I've said, there are some things that I'll stick with because they're horrible enough to make me want to analyze why... ;) (Well, all right, horrible might not be the right word; things that have made it into production, that people respond to, that I... don't, in a specific way that lends itself to examination?)

Okay, have finally got to "Luminosity", and it's... interesting, in that it reveals that the original is so flimsy that to even try to redeem the basic premise into a coherent work of fiction basically means to throw the whole damn thing out but the names. Thinking-Bella... isn't really Bella, and while A's done an amazing job of reshaping the raw data of SM's worldbuilding into a proper narrative, it actually kind of transforms it into another phylum of work altogether; "Luminosity" is straight-up genre fiction, "Twilight" is somewhere over into drug-trip allegory-land, and I think that that's what the readers are responding to good and bad. Take the hallucinatory quality out of the setting, and it's not "Twilight", however much better it may be on its own merits. (Interestingly, the couple of other fics I've read also fell down hard on that -- I think where it goes wrong is that other writers approach it like there's a possibility of anything Making Sense if they just tried a little harder with the material, and that doesn't really work with revelatory experiences...)